Times are hard. Economic growth is stagnant. The bill for public services is soaring and will only get higher, consuming more of a diminishing national income. And the government is an uneasy coalition between radical reformers and conservatives. The conclusion: the country can no longer afford the welfare state. And that was in 1982.

The newly released cabinet papers from the fourth year of the first Thatcher government are certainly a prequel to the 2012 welfare reforms. But more than that, they amount almost to a foundation document for the debate around welfare, ensuring that it came to be framed in the context of efficiency and affordability, a question always of price and never of value.

The 1982 paper arose from one of the Treasury's more apocalyptic forecasts for public spending. Sir Geoffrey Howe, then chancellor, and proponent of the smaller state, wanted ideas about how to achieve it. Its conclusions – the virtual destruction of the welfare state including, expressly, of the NHS – should have been less startling than they were. They start with acceptance of the Treasury's scepticism of the state's capacity to afford cradle-to-grave provision, while Sir Geoffrey himself had set out his own belief that state provision of welfare was corrupting not only of the national finances, but of society itself, in an essay more than 20 years earlier.

When the rest of the cabinet saw the Central Policy Review Staff paper there was (as Nigel Lawson recorded in his memoirs) a "riot". Leaked to the Economist in one of the most celebrated examples of the subversive capacity of open government, Mrs Thatcher was forced to deny that any of the ideas in the paper had traction in her government. Yet, over the next 30 years, many of them – paying for higher education, privatisation of parts of the NHS, the use of vouchers in education – have been at least partially introduced. So much for the perception of politics as a hand-to-mouth affair, a matter of instant response and ceaseless reinvention that is the unavoidable product of the one-click age. The real stuff of political change is slow burn, an organic process, growing out of what has gone before.

But that does not mean it is inevitable, nor inexorable. Far from it. Ideas are continuously vulnerable to re-evaluation and redirection. There is no such thing as a political fait accompli, only a work in progress. Thirty years ago, even a politician like Mrs Thatcher, approaching the height of her power, was unable to bulldoze her cabinet into accepting reforms that her ministers – some of whom were genuinely horrified – knew voters would not tolerate. Geoffrey Howe could not roll back the state quite as he dreamed.

Protagonists of welfare reform argued that they started the debate before its time. It came too soon, and rather than advancing their cause, set it back. Now it's clearer that it forced Labour to develop its own welfare reform agenda, and that it struggled to escape from the narrative of cuts. Redefining reform as a question of efficiency tended only to reinforce the idea of welfare as essentially an economic activity at the expense of its moral ambition.

These papers are a reminder of just how personality and persistence and political climate, left unchallenged by a persuasive counter-commentary, work on ideas as inexorably as ice once shaped the landscape. Like geological strata, they reveal the imprint of a prime minister translated by Falklands victory from beleaguered weakling to political colossus, a chancellor seizing bleak economic projections to promote a welfare reform agenda that he had mapped out as a young man 20 years before, and the fossilised remains of the first campaign in the long war to reverse Labour's 1945 vision of welfare that now, 30 years later, is on the brink of fulfilment. But they also show the importance of finding a frame for an argument, then making it again, again, and again.